Higher Order Corrections to Jet Cross Sections in Hadron Colliders

Abstract

We describe a general method of calculating the fully differential cross section for the production of jets at next-to-leading order in a hadron collider. This method is based on a `crossing' of next-to-leading order calculations with all partons in the final state. The method introduces universal crossing functions that allow a modular approach to next-to-leading order calculations for any process with initial state partons. These techniques are applied to the production of jets in association with a vector boson including all decay correlations of the final state observables.